Strange Vegetation

For Strange Vegetation, I worked with Yevgeniya Kaganovich and Nathaniel Stern on writing and thinking their kinetic, latex sculptures. Strange Vegetation grows an ecological system out of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum’s unique decor. It is a site-specific installation incorporated with the repeated pattern of exotic greenery and floral iron work on the walls around it. Here, a system of physically interconnected and identical plant-like forms project, as bulbous roots, from the floor. Their stalks reach from below painted skirting to the wallpaper above. Over a dozen of these large, latex volumes slowly breathe in and out, an inflation and deflation cycle that gradually distorts each form.

documentation photos

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Strange Vegetation germinates and mutates the wallpaper’s images into living and breathing things; where paint and wallpaper meet becomes the ground from which foliage sprouts; and these inflated volumes interweave with one another and the implied life of the cultural institution.

The Villa Terrace is intended to accumulate and preserve the products of human time. Strange Vegetation, then, thinks beyond this lifecycle – in Earth time. It transforms the site from museal space to biological habitat, producing a fantastical organism of an imagined future. Strange Vegetation suggests that all built environments are (a) vibrant matter with the capacity for their own movement, change and agency over time.